Today on the Golden Girls, Dorothy got a phone call. All that the audience sees of this phone call is Dorothy talking - you dont see or hear who is on the other end of the line, but you can still figure out what was said.
If anyone is interested, this is basically how it went.
Dorothy: Hello?.. Speaking… Yes, she is mother…No, I thought she was with you. She was supposed to be in recovery until - Well, what do you mean she’s not there? … Oh MY God! No, No, I’ll be right there! [hangs up phone]
Blanche: Who was that?
Dorothy: The hospital! They’ve lost my mother!!
Anyway, I was wandering, what do actors hear in the phone when they have to answer it? Is it another actor saying things that would make sense in the conversation? Or is it a promptor who says the lines that the actor is supposed to say out loud? Or, is it just silence? Can the actor hear himself or herself in the earpiece or is it not even plugged in?
If anyone can help me it would greatly be appreciated.
Thank you,
love
Sneeze
I don’t know about the other shows, but I don’t think there is anybody on the other end of the phone on Golden Girls. Have you ever noticed they’ll go through an entire conversation in about 30 secs with very little pause?
IANITFI (I am not in the film industry) but I have friends who are, and I’ve been on my fair share of movie sets. I am not sure, but I think it could go many ways. And I suspect that it is done several ways, depending on the filming situation.
In the case of a sitcom, probably she is just talking to dead air. Think about it - when someone is acting in a stage play, they probably don’t have anyone on the line. And, like Pepperland says, they get through a conversation REAL fast. I think they just know how to make the conversation sound authentic.
I am pretty sure that on some films, they will later do voice overs, to fix up lines that got screwed up, or sounded mangled. This is pretty standard, I think. So, I suspect that there are times when someone offstage is reading the “lines” of the person on the other end of the line, so that the timing will be right. And then the offstage “lines” can be edited out later. I am not sure this happens, but I just get this gut feeling it does sometimes.
Also - I just saw the film “You’ve Got Mail” (w/ Tom Hanks & Meg Ryan.) There is one scene where Tom is emailing Meg, thinking to himself (we hear his “thinking”), and occasionally he will talk aloud. The timing for this would be far too tricky to do without help. (How long should he wait to allow the “thinking” part to pass, before he actually speaks his lines?) I suspect that someone offstage was reading the lines that Tom was “thinking” aloud, so that he would know the right timing to do the actual talking aloud. If you follow all that.
Bob Newhart is a comedy genius doing one-sided telephone “conversations” on stage as well as TV sitcoms. He would often speak for the person on the other end, as if repeating what was said, with comic timing being more important than realistic pauses. Newhart’s timing is very good, and there isn’t anyone on the other end of his line. I think this is the challenge that actors must rise to on most TV sitcoms…
I was recently at a play where I not only heard the phone ring, but heard the person on the other end (not exact words, however, just sounds).
Maybe I was going crazy, however, as the phone answerer was an incredibly gorgeous woman. I missed much of the play due to her.
But, knowing most sets, I can’t see that this would even be close to being the norm, which is strange because it would be easy enough to set up a phone system which rings inside like businesses have to do just what some posters here suggested.
In the numerous stage plays and tiny number of independent films I’ve done, there’s never anything on the other end of the phone. Almost invariably, in fact, it’s unplugged (or turned off), to eliminate the chance it might unexpectedly ring and ruin the scene.
The observation of fast conversations is spot-on, also. Next time you see somebody on the phone on TV or in a movie, and you just hear their side of the discussion, note how long the pauses are. They’re tiny; there’s no realistic way the other person could get out their dialogue in that time frame. The average television sitcom has about 21 minutes, divided into three 7-minute segments, to get through their storyline; any silence is basically dead air, which wastes time and makes the viewer more likely to switch away.
I’ve noticed that cordless phones are used almost all the time now in films and TV. Not only do you have to worry about the phone being plugged in, you can do the shot anywhere and not have to account for cords.
And it can be quite dramatic or funny when someone throws a phone.
If you look at some (especially older) TV shows you’ll see that there isn’t even a cord to connect the phone to the (nonexistent) phone jack (and I’m not talking about cordless phones here). I assume they do this to keep the set from getting cluttered. If the phone isn’t connected to anything then the actor has to imagine the “response” to his/her side of the conversation.
That’s because in TV-land, most phones are on a table by the sofa…where is the wire? Under the carpet?
Lots of TV-land computers operate the same way.
Look, no cables connecting the keyboard and monitor to the CPU! It’s not even plugged in! Wow!
